When You Can't Even Trust Your Own Mind Anymore:
Gloria de Oliveira on Gaslighting, Trauma, and Love After Betrayal
Imagine you're having an argument with someone you love. You remember exactly what happened, and you're ready to talk about it. But forty minutes into the conversation, you're no longer sure what started the whole thing. Twenty minutes later, you're apologizing. And by the end of the night, you're lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out how the hell you managed to ruin such a lovely evening. The next morning, they make you coffee, kiss you on the forehead, and act like nothing happened. And you think, God, they're actually so sweet. Maybe I really was overreacting.
Congratulations, your reality just got a little rewrite. And you weren't the one doing the editing!
Of course, one bad argument doesn't automatically mean emotional abuse. People make mistakes, misremember conversations, and sometimes act like complete assholes without actually meaning any harm. The problem starts when these things become a pattern, and you slowly lose confidence in things you literally saw happen with your own eyes.
Psychologists call one form of this manipulation gaslighting. The term has long since become an internet meme, used to describe pretty much anything, including a friend insisting that you were the one who ate the last slice of pizza. But behind the trendy word is a very real mechanism: systematically undermining someone's trust in their own memory, feelings, and perception of reality.
In her 2019 study The Sociology of Gaslighting, sociologist Paige Sweet describes gaslighting as a process closely tied to power and isolation. When someone has fewer and fewer opportunities to compare their version of events with anyone else's, another person's version can gradually become the only one that matters.
And here's where things get particularly ugly. Sometimes getting out of a destructive relationship takes more than just leaving. You have to learn how to trust your own mind all over again.
That's exactly what German-Brazilian musician Gloria de Oliveira explores on her new album, The Lying Swans, out October 30 via La Double Vie and Cargo Records. Nine tracks about trauma, betrayal, illusions, and the struggle to trust yourself again. Produced by Randall Dunn, who has worked with Anna von Hausswolff and Marissa Nadler, the album blends German Romanticism, Brazilian music, and the eerie atmosphere of Italian horror films.
But this isn't exactly a story about turning suffering into beautiful art. Gloria started writing these songs while she was still going through the experience, with no idea how things would turn out. And rather than looking back and shaping everything into a neat, beautiful narrative, she decided to keep all the emotional messiness intact.
THE OTO spoke with Gloria de Oliveira about why trauma doesn't always need to become a personal growth story, how gaslighting can make you question your own reality, and what happens when, after everything you've been through, you finally let yourself fall in love again.
Gloria: More or less right away. When the same painful feelings and thoughts keep reverberating in my head, the way I usually process things is by writing them down. Therefore, most of the album was born in the eye of the storm, so to speak. I don’t think I would have been able to muster the same vulnerability and display some of the uglier, unflattering parts of this experience with too much distance in between.
I also think there is something to be said for creating while you are still very close to an experience, because you haven't yet had the chance to construct a tidy narrative around it. There are a lot of contrasting, perhaps irrational feelings and confusion all taking place at the same time, and these seeming contradictions lie at the heart of the aftermath of a lot of traumatic experiences, in my eyes. I wanted to preserve some of that messiness rather than retrospectively make sense of everything.
To me, an album is also generally meant to be a time capsule, capturing what I felt and how I saw things during a particular period. That’s why it’s so important to know when it’s finished and when to let go, and not keep on trying to polish and edit forever (which I can definitely be guilty of, despite my best intentions).
THE OTO: The Wind Took It Away was first written after you escaped an abusive situation. When you listen to that song now, do you still hear the person you were during that summer, or does it feel like it belongs to someone else?
Gloria:I can still hear her and understand her. Music and aural processing in general have a peculiar ability to take us back to places, even from early childhood. Like a window to our past selves.
THE OTO: A recurring idea on the album is learning to tell truth from illusion and trusting your own perception again. What does it actually take to rebuild that trust after someone has made you doubt what you see and feel?
Gloria: For me, it took creating distance, geographically and by cutting contact, and also finally starting to confide in my friends again. Abuse can isolate you so much. I was ashamed of what was happening to me, how it reflected on me, on my choices, on my self-worth. So I kept it a secret for a long time.
Talking about it with people I trusted was very important because it gave me points of reference outside of that relationship. When you are isolated for long enough, your reality can become very small, especially when good old gaslighting is involved. Reconnecting with my friends and also with my very own life, centering myself in it, helped me regain confidence in my perception.
THE OTO: There’s a surprising amount of beauty and tenderness on an album rooted in some very dark experiences. Why was it important for darkness not to have the final word?
Gloria: Because this life and its inherent beauty are all we have, in my eyes. I don’t believe we will be rewarded for our suffering. The peaks and the valleys, the light and the dark, are all valuable parts of the human experience and of being alive. All the darkness doesn’t annihilate beauty, but it does of course make it harder to grasp or appreciate. A constant battle that is worth fighting.
THE OTO: Your music brings together Brazilian influences, German Romanticism, horror cinema and mythology. Do you experience those worlds simply as artistic references, or are they different languages for different parts of yourself?
Gloria: That’s a beautiful way of putting it. They are different languages (literally as well as figuratively), perhaps different keys to aspects of myself. I also like the fact that these worlds can contradict each other. “The Lying Swans” was always supposed to inhabit that tension between light and dark, beauty and danger.
THE OTO: The myth of Leda sits at the heart of The Lying Swans, and its meaning changes dramatically depending on who is telling the story. What drew you to that myth as a way of talking about consent, betrayal and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened to us?
Gloria: The tale of Leda has been depicted and analysed in art and culture for centuries, and I understand the fascination. It’s interesting how it has often been so romanticized while carrying violence, or at the very least betrayal, at its heart.
In it, Zeus disguises himself as a swan in order to approach the Spartan princess Leda, and the question of whether what follows is a story of seduction or assault changes depending on the perspective through which it is being told. Leda’s own “complicity” remains a point of discussion. This seeming ambiguity felt very relevant to the themes of the album and to my own experience. Sometimes it takes us a while to realise what is or was really going on. And I was interested in exploring and dissecting Leda’s point of view.
THE OTO: After making an album so deeply concerned with illusion, recognition and learning to trust yourself again, what do you understand about yourself now that you couldn’t have understood when you started writing it?
Gloria: I understand that I am not alone in this situation, and what happened wasn’t necessarily my fault. Talking to some of my musical collaborators on the album while we were recording, I found out that a lot of them shared similar experiences, along with the shame that comes with them. There’s something soothing about discovering that these things were not as unique to me as I had imagined them to be, as sad as that is.
Realising this also changed my understanding of the album itself somewhat. What initially felt like something intensely personal now feels like part of a much more universal, often unspoken experience.
______
So, sometimes terrible things happen to us, and they don't teach us a damn thing. They don't have to make us stronger, either. But one day, we start trusting ourselves again, hanging out with friends, doing the things we love, and even falling in love. And we realize that, thankfully, our lives didn't end with the person who once made us believe they would.
The Lying Swans is out October 30 - give it a listen, especially if you've ever had to put yourself back together. Or simply if you love beautiful, slightly unsettling music that makes you want to sit in silence for a while and think about your life.
______
Photo: Beto Ruiz Alonso
